June 9, 2021Pin your power supply hopes on sunshine and breezes, and get prepared for mixed results.
South Australians, Californians and Texans know what comes from an overreliance on the unreliables, with plenty of experience of weather-related load shedding and mass blackouts.
Increasing dependence on chaotically intermittent wind and solar is the price we’ve paid for allowing ideology to ride roughshod over sound engineering and solid economics.
Once the engineers were relegated to the back office by wind and solar worshipping ideologues equipped with sociology or arts/law degrees, the end of reliably delivered power at affordable prices was inevitable.
This is the crowd that can’t tell the critical difference between ‘energy’ and ‘power’; that believes the yawning gulf between the promises made by the wind and solar industries and reality can be plugged by a few giant lithium batteries; who berates anybody who mentions sunset and calm weather and renewable energy in a sentence; and who find mathematics, logic and reason all a deathly bore. All the things that engineers are trained to live and breathe, are simply dismissed as old school nonsense.
Well, in Scotland at least, the engineers have finally broken their shackles; they’re on the offensive and they are clearly not happy about where things have landed since ideology was allowed to trump engineering.
Tilting at windmills: Engineers accuse ministers of relying too much on renewables
Herald Scotland
Sandra Dick
23 May 2021
